In Canada's case they've barely even bothered to feed outrage. Harper clearly wants to cooperate with the U.S. national-security establishment and doesn't care to even hide it.

I think in the U.S.'s current situation it's hard to find things that even more moderate people would accept that are still big enough to produce a significant change in energy. A big hydro installation is really big, and typically requires flooding an absolutely massive area. China can pull off something like the Three Gorges project because it's heavily central planned and controls dissent, but I don't think you could get that to fly in the U.S., even if the major environmental groups disappeared tomorrow. Heck even something the size of the Hoover Dam is not that palatable to many people anymore.

Maybe if it were really in the middle of nowhere, like damming up a river in Alaska, than the average person would be fine with it, and you'd have only environmentalists opposing it. But energy transmission is expensive, so damming rivers in Alaska isn't very cost-effective.

A bit over 99% of the electricity generated in Norway is from hydro plants, because it has a ton of hydro resources.

The base $799 model also comes with less SSD space and a slower processor. That may or may not matter for you, but is worth looking at. For me 64GB of space (what the entry-level Surface Pro 3 has) is getting to be tight.

To get a rough spec equivalent to the MacBook Air, which comes with an i5 CPU, 128GB SSD, and a keyboard, you have to spend about $1100 on the Surface Pro 3, which is a bit pricier than the $899 MacBook Air.

Glad to see that Facebook are reading Comrade Stalin's writing with such diligence.

There's nothing that stops you from coming back in the same way if you'd like.

And that's not all the extra rights that non-citizens have! They don't even have to register for the draft, or serve on juries!

Fwiw this is more or less what happens in countries with mandatory-voting laws (at least the western ones I know of). The default and expected option is that everyone votes, but if you specifically want to protest The System by not voting, you stay home as a protest and don't vote. This is technically civil disobedience but not prosecuted.

1. No, punishment per se is not justified. Or at least even if it might theoretically be in some cases, trusting the state with this power is not a good idea.

2. However, society does need to be protected in extreme cases, and this is properly the state's job. Ideally this can be done through preventative measures, ranging from police patrols to education. But yes, some people (hopefully a small number) may have to be physically restrained in order to keep them from harming others. This isn't intended as "retribution" or "punishment" but rather simply as a protective measure for the general public. How long should such people be physically restrained? For the amount of time that is necessary to protect society, based on the best available scientific data on the subject. Therefore generally short sentences (3 years) for most crimes, with a strong focus on rehabilitation and reintegration into society, so you don't create hardened criminals where that wasn't the case before. And sentences of about 10-20 years for very serious crimes (almost exclusively violent crimes), mostly on the basis that elderly people very rarely commit violent crimes, so even for murder, there is little risk to society if you release a 50-year-old from prison, and very little benefit in incarcerating him or her further. And finally indefinite sentences (or possibly involuntary commitment in an institution) for the tiny minority of people who are extremely dangerous or psychotic or otherwise cannot ever be safely released.

This is roughly the system currently implemented in Scandinavia, and to a lesser extent in other parts of Europe.

I'm not sure #1 has changed in terms of proportion of papers, though there are certainly more total papers. If you read through 19th-century scientific journals and conference reports, there is a lot of really mediocre stuff, not only mediocre in retrospect but just kind of filler at any time. Someone saw a thing and wrote it up and well here it is hope this helps. And then writes in again a few months later with an update on how it's going, no results but promising some results later. The proportion of papers that are really impactful, with important results of long-term value, is small.

Didn't the NFSv4 design decision to use Kerberos for authentication mean that some kind of time sync would be needed anyway whether NFS itself mandated it or not, since Kerberos relies on synchronized clocks?

A surprising number of things are starting to rely on these curated lists to handle "most" cases. The valid-key flip-side of this key blocklist is the public-key pinning list, which is also pretty half-assed.

With a different (non-crypto) bit of web technology, there's also the mess of how to determine what the "real" domain of a site controlled by an entity is. E.g. in the UK, a domain like example.co.uk is a third-level domain, but is conventionally treated as domain 'example' with suffix '.co.uk', not as domain 'co' in TLD 'uk', and subdomain 'example'. Whereas in dot-com, a domain like foo.example.com would be treated as domain 'example' in TLD 'com', with subdomain 'foo'. How to tell which is which? Yes, some human maintains a giant list, which browsers all build in.

Yeah, that's common across the region; Saudi Arabia does it too. Seems a bit unnecessarily old-fashioned, since with computerized passport control these days you could keep someone from traveling by just flagging them in the computer, no need to actually confiscate the passport. But maybe keeping the physical passport is a better intimidation tool?

It's an old-school feudal state mixing in a little bit of a hot modern idea, corporate oligarchy. The businessmen and sheikhs (many of whom are related) run the place, and jailing foreign workers if they get inconvenient is one of their main tools to retain control. Usually you don't hear about it because most of the workers aren't from the USA.

Yeah I can see Linux being important, I just didn't think companies put much stock in the certifications themselves, vs. work experience or interviews or other such screening methods. There was a period in the '90s when certs were a big deal, Microsoft's MSCE and Certified Novell Administrator and Cisco's CCNA and whatever, but in the 2000s the certs started being more ignored, at least in my experience, b/c they weren't that reliable a demonstration that the employee was actually any good. Maybe they're back, or the RHEL ones are taken more seriously?